The Edgelands #2: David Rayson

David Rayson,

'From Ash Park to Wednesfield',

acrylic on canvas, 2003

‘’In our local shopping precinct there are a few general stores, a play-park and just by the underpass is the off-licence, which seems to be open all hours.

Tomorrow if I go out those things will mostly still be there, there will be some changes, cars parked in slightly different places, a lot of the litter will have been cleared up and replaced by new litter, and the curtains down the street will have moved. People who work who will have left their houses empty, in others the lights will be on.

Whether I’m inside or out, everything seems to be continually unravelling and becoming more unreal. I’m drawing out these things in an attempt to make sense of everything and to celebrate my everyday fantastic’.

David Rayson, 2009, born Wolverhampton 1966

Link: http://vimeo.com/25035919

Summer Exhibition at The Public

Stolen Car, 

Charcoal on Paper, A2 size

I’ve had these three charcoal drawings accepted in the Summer Exhibition at The Public, West Bromwich. The exhibition begins next week and is up until September. You have to be somehow connected to Sandwell (I was born in West Bromwich) to apply, as it is a ‘showcase’ of the area’s creative talents.  Having shown last year, I found it to be a nice mix of professional and amateur artists with all sorts of things on display.

 Stolen Car 2, 

charcoal on paper, A2 size

Those sort of shows can look terrible, however and can do nothing for your work (I’m thinking of the Worcester Open last year which I also took part in but wish I hadn’t-there was no selection at all, just a totally open thing which looked so stuffed that nothing could be seen). But I really enjoyed last year’s show at The Public where I exhibited a large portrait. The show is a bit more selected, and with it being a new show last year there weren’t as many entries. I did wonder what the hang  would look like though as I handed in my work next to the large air-brushed painting of Robert Plant.  Somehow though, it all seemed to fit together…

Stolen Car 3, 

charcoal on paper, A2 size

I only anticipated that hopefully, I would get one selected but all three being chosen came as a bit of a surprise. The selectors thought they looked better as a group. As a consequence it has meant getting all three framed which hasn’t been cheap, but I’m really pleased with how they appear. It’s exciting participating in some new exhibitions again, and showing all new work…I encouraged one of my students, Hasan, to apply and he has also been selected for his excellent landscape painting. It will be a nice end to his course to exhibit together, as I have been his personal tutor and painting teacher for the last two years. 

Sweeping Up....

Yesterday I finally installed this exhibition of my ‘crapola’ still lives at the college I work at, Joseph Chamberlain Sixth Form, ahead of our annual Arts Festival this Saturday, the 7^th. 

Since making the commitment that this is what I would show this year, I’ve been working really hard on pushing forward with these small paintings in the last few weeks and trying to make some sort of statement in relation to the ‘Edgelands’ with them. I’ve made over 30, and installed 28 in the exhibition. I think I’m pretty pleased, but I’m not entirely sure. The response from people has been very positive, however so that’s great. When I completed my last one on Sunday night I did feel that I had come to the end of this particular road for now, and it would be good to return to my landscape work. I’m a bit exhausted by them. 

It does feel like it has been worthwhile though, and in a way my first statement within my edgelands project. It’s good now to draw a line under them, and move on. This is the statement (below) that I decided to present alongside the work…

'Over the last few months whilst out and about in cafes, restaurants and motorway service stations I have become a little obsessed with scooping up my bits of leftover packaging, empty cups and cartons and screwed up paper bags and stuffing them in my jacket pockets to take back to the studio to make these small still life paintings. As I have made more of them and hung them on the studio wall I felt they have slowly begun to develop and suggest possible layers of meaning related to the increasing banalization of culture in our globalized and corporate controlled society.

This society’s values are reflected in the reduced edgelands landscape of motorway service stations and retail parks. In this society the pursuit of profit is considered as the only means of salvation for mankind, and turnover the absolute priority. Individual identity seems to become more and more lost and the world reduced to familiar signs and symbols encouraging us to buy more, consume more.

The single, empty cups and ephemera represent this loss of identity and also the solitude in which people today live. A solitude confirmed daily by networks of bodiless and false images concerning the world. The paintings of brushes standing up in turps filled jars represent this painter’s attempt to paint and reclaim a more tangible reality and a more personal interaction with the world. I don’t view painting as an outdated activity in the digital age.

Today, to try and paint is an act of resistance instigating hope.'

Shaun Morris,

July 2012

Yeah, I'm a bit surprised to have ended up here too. That's what excites me about them in the end....